Ombre Dyeing Cotton

There has been unbeknownst to me a new trend in clothing -- those with a gradation of color across one surface of the garment as in a dress that has a bodice that is white on the top going through the greys and being black at the waste. There has been some talk of this on the Dyerslist which is my favorite dye listing.



So, it seemed like the proper thing to document how I do this "ombre" dyeing on cottons. All of the references I found on Google showed how to do it on silks with acid dyes. With acid dyes, if you want the solid colors, you would most likely use a pot on the stove. You can gradate the color by allowing part of the fabric to sit in the dye longer than other parts of the fabric, just holding part out and dipping down to get some color. It is not that difficult to get the gradation. I have also done this with a skein of yarn as well. When doing the yarn, I kept part of the yarn in the original dye bath for the longest and would slowly lower the yarn and add a bit of water as well.



An art quilting friend commissioned me (I really don't do commisions except as a favor to friends) to create a taupey gradated single piece of cotton 45" x 60" inches. First I did a normal gradation to show her a series of colors so that she could pick out the one she liked the best (she bought all those too!). She picked one and I created several cups of dyes in different gradations of the one color. I then pretreated the fabric with soda ash. In this case I didn't use pfd fabric but used a commercial moda white which does have some sort of finish on it. The finish inhibits the dyes from taking quite as quickly (wouldn't be good if you wanted a really dark gradation as it doesn't dye with the intensity of the pfd cottons). I also painted the whole piece of fabric with a print paste mixture. This will also inhibit the dyes from taking quite as quickly. I then started painting the fabric with those large Japanese brushes you can get from Dharma Trading as they hold lots of dye. I painted as rapidly as I could from light to dark so there would not be too much of a line. I then let it sit for about 8 hours at 70 degrees and washed it out.



I currently have another "commission" outstanding to do this with two colors -- also pale. This time I will probably use the direct dyeing technique of mixing the soda ash with the dyes at the time I am applying them. This recipe is 4:1 bicarbonate of soda to soda ash. I hope this will slow down the process a bit more.




This is the final piece that was done with the fabric I dyed. The quilt is called Swamp Angel and was done by quilt artist Caren Betlinski. You can see all the ribbons it won in our local quilt show! It also was accepted into Paducah AQS show the following year. She used all my hand dyes in this piece and then did extensive thread painting which is her signature style. I always get a big kick out of seeing my fabrics in the various artworks of my friends. When I was selling from a shop a few years ago, occasionally I would see people with a quilt with fabric that I recognized as mine and that would give me a big kick as well!

Common Problems with Procion MX Fiber Reactive Dyes

There are a number of things to make your dyeing experience less than positive. As time permits, I will try to discuss a few of the things I have learned along the way. Sometimes just keeping things organized in your dye area can help. I am constantly amazed by the amount of misinformation there is about these dyes floating around the internet. I am certainly not an expert but have about 20 years of dyeing under my belt and know when I am in over my head!!

First, my list of five things you need to make the dyes work:

1. The dye powders. Preferably these are less than 2 years old but I have used many that were much older. The results are not as predictable but they still can work if they have been kept in a cool dry area, tightly sealed. Be cautious about the ones you might find at your local art supply store in very small jars as these can have quite a bit of age on them.
2. Water. This needs to be warm but NOT hot. I have seen a number of dyers recommend hot water to dissolve the dyes. These dyes will will react with water quickly and become much less reactive with the fibers. So keep the water between 80 and 90 degrees if you can. The exceptions to this are turquoise and ProChem's basic blue (the only blue that tends to red) which can tolerate (and even like) a warmer temp.
3. Soda Ash (also known as sodium carbonate and often found as pH+ in your local pool supply store). This is needed to provide the environment in which the dyes can attach to the fiber. The reaction requires a "basic" environment to react.
4. Environmental Temperature above 70 degrees. These dyes will behave very sluggishly below 70 degrees so especially when doing direct dye applications, the ambient temperature needs to be above 70 degrees.
5. Prepared For Dyeing (PFD) Fabric or Fiber. This means that the fiber contains no fillers or finishes. I very much prefer mercerized cottons to those that have not have this process. It makes the colors appear to be much clearer and brighter and darker. However, I have used non-pfd fabric and even fabric with finishes. If you are dyeing something with just a hint of color, these seem to work just fine but don't expect those showy pieces!

Given that you have put a check mark to all the above, these are problems (or opportunities) that seem to come up:

• Splotches of color on the fabric -- this is usually from two causes: (1) the dyes have not fully dissolved in the water and (2) transfer of dye from one surface to another. There are three ways to improve on the first which are to (a) use urea as an additive to the water into which you are dissolving the dye powders. Best to do this by dissolving the urea in the water ahead of time and then dissolving the dyes into this urea water. Urea water is made with 5 1/2 tbsp urea to one cup of water. (b) make your dyes a few hours before you want to use them to make sure the powders are dissolved. The solution should look clear and not cloudy. Cloudy means undissolved dyes. Keep adding urea until the dyes fully dissolve. (A friend uses rain water and it is so soft that she never has to add urea.) (c) if all else fails, strain the dye liquids through those old pantyhose that you will never wear again! The solution to dyes transferring from one project to another is basic. I am a sloppy dyer and I rarely if ever have that problem anymore (but I used to). I now always have a bucket of fresh water next to me and I rinse my gloved hands constantly when moving from one thing to another or before I pick up a piece of fabric.
• The fabric looked great until I washed it - There are several causes of this but the most prevalent is that you forgot to put the soda ash in. Make sure you are using sodium cabonate instead of sodium bicarbonate. Some pool stores are now using sodium bicarbonate as their pH+ so make sure you check the labels. A second set of causes is that you didn't let the fabric stay in the soda ash long enough or the water was too hot or too cold. Another problem occurs if you are using large amounts of water as in vat or washing machine dyeing. You have to use uniodized salt equivalent in weight to the fabric in the dye bath. Otherwise too much of the dye reacts with the water instead of the fabric. Lastly, the dyes may just be exhausted and have no more umph so save them for coloring paper. I have also found that some pfd fabric has been mislabelled and is not really pfd so I get a pale result instead of the brilliance I expected.
• The colors are not what I expected - The biggest culprit here is mixing fuchsia with just about any blue and expecting purple! This is most pronounced with the combination of fuchsia and turquoise. If you are doing vat dyeing and you are stirring like a madman, you might get some decent results. Using low water immersion with fairly hefty percentages of dyes will result in fabric that is mostly fuchsia, a few spots of purple and lots of blue filling in between. Fuchsia does not play well with others in low water immersion applications. Turquoise compounds the problem by being very slow to react as it does like the warmer environment. I have found results more to my liking by doing two things -- for fuchsia I rarely use more than a 1% or 2% concentration and I usually up the concentration of the turquoise by 2 and use warmer water. I also manipulate the fabric a lot more than I would normally.

To be continued.

Genesee Riverwalk on a Perfect Spring Day

For those of you who haven't yet walked the wonderful path along the Genesee River in Charlotte, get on those hiking shoes!! It is an easy beautiful walk through woods and then across a lengthy boardwalk that crosses over the marshes. It was amazing that there were not more people out on this holiday weekend -- it is indeed one of Rochester's treasures.




This is my daughter Zann from Seattle with Warren just before the boardwalk part of the pathway. They were waiting for me poking along.


This is one of the many mallards that were along the way. There were even some babies off in the distance.



This is a mama-to-be mute swan slipping off the nest for a minute so we could get pictures of her eggs.



This is dad keeping an eye on what mom was doing and also clearing a pathway to the main pond area. He was very busy while we were watching.



This was looking down the river toward the lake from one end of the boardwalk area.
These were some of the many pretty wildflowers that I saw along the way. I think they are wild geraniums but not sure about that!

I have no idea what these bushes cascading with pink blossoms were. They were also in white and looked like honeysuckle but I always thought that was a vine.

I just liked the lacey appearance of these fragile flowers.


This is the view down the boardwalk area. You can see it wasn't very crowded which is fine with me!!

GVQC 2009 Raffle Quilt - Group Work Day

Mary Wieser, Janet Root, Beverly Kondolf and Jeanne Simpson concentrating on the direction we are taking with the beginnings of the quilt up on Pat's design wall.


This is the first iteration of the center (how it was designed) with the large lighter colored center flower.
We tried a second iteration which had four flowers with the center between those flowers being green and we didn't care for that one at all.


This is the third iteration of the center where you have a suggestion of a flower in the background but only four real flowers. We all liked that one the best. (Of course we were all auditioning it with our digital cameras as well!)


Progress is quickly being made on the magnificent quilt which was created for our 2009 GVQC quilt show (http://www.geneseequiltfest.com/). This is Pat Pauly Chris Wickert and Mary Wieser concentrating on design.

This quilt started with some ideas thrown around in a meeting a few months ago. After agreeing upon some general design ideas, Pat Pauly designed the specific paper-pieced patterns which were used in creating the quilt. We then asked for fabrics to be donated by quilt members in certain color families (dark and medium blues, all shades of green and all shades of red and red/orange). Adding a whole bunch more from several of our stashes, we made up a number of kits to be handed out at quilt meetings. The kits contained the pattern and fabric for one element of the quilt. There were small flowers and at least two leaf patterns for the background.



This is the first iteration of the background of the quilt. While it was aesthetically pleasing, the piecing looked like a nightmare so changes were made to make up rows.

We actually had one new volunteer who joined us this time as she LOVES taking the paper out of the backs of paper piecing . This was Jenna Darlak and she was a much welcomed addition to the team.

A second team started trying to arrange the background leaves and flowers above which were all done using 60 degree diamond shaped foundations. After a couple of iterations, it was decided to work on a quarter of the background at a time and arrange the diamonds so that the stitching would be simplified. To do this, we had to make a lot of plain diamonds as well as well as 60 degree triangles so team 3 set out to make diamonds and triangles to use as filler pieces in the background. I worked this effort. When I saw that there were lots of scraps, I started sewing the scraps together and then cutting out diamonds and triangles from those which added a little more interest to the background. Pat saw that and requested that I add some very small pieces of medium green into these randomly pieced fabrics. They really added a lot so I have a pile of fabric now to start doing some more.



This is the center medallion where the rows are starting to come together and are sewn. It is really stunning in person!




This is the final iteration of the background closeup. A team was sewing these background pieces together in a long row to determine if we had the right number of pieces yet. The final dimensions of the quilt will be 84 x 96. A great challenge will be inserting the 90 degree angled center medallion into the background made of 60 degree shapes!!

A pattern using the central medallion set on a blue background with a border will be offered for sale in conjunction with the quilt show.

Monoprinting with MX Fiber Reactive Dyes - Part 2

As discussed in the previous post, there are many options open to you when deciding you want to monoprint. For all of the options discussed, I used pre-treated PFD fabric. PFD fabric is fabric with no whiteners, permanent press finishes or anything that might interfere with the absorbtion of the dyes. I personally prefer using mercerized cottons, any 100% rayon or rayon/linen mixtures. You can also use tencel, bamboo or silk or any combination of those fibers as they are all cellulosic fibers (except for silk which acts like both a protein and a cellulosic fiber). I pre-treat the fabric by first washing it with a little soda ash and synthrapol, drying it and than soaking it in a soda ash solution (9 tbsps soda ash/gallon of water) for about 15 minutes. I then line dry the fabric and press it with the coolest iron that will press it flat. You can also use damp or wet fabrics with this technique and you will get a different result. I prefer the sharpness of the images using dried pre-treated fabric though.

There are several surfaces that I have used to monoprint fabric. These include heavy duty tablecloth plastic (the kind you buy at Joanns by the yard), laminated masonite ($10 for a 4 x 8 white sheet at your local home improvement store), plexiglass, and (one of my favorites) the large rolls of fun foam that you find at Joanns. All will give you different results. Dyes tend to bead up more on the plastic and brushstrokes are more obvious. The foam provides a little texture which hides some of the above a bit.

Tne of the secrets of using thickened dyes is to realize that although you might use the initial recipes contained in various dye books for making the thickened dye, you can add urea water to the mixture until it is the thickness that you like working with the best. If you live in the dryer climates, it is very important to use urea when making up your dyes for direct dyeing or monoprinting applications. My process is to make a very thick print paste mixture and to thin it down as I use it. This mixture will last for a pretty long time if not exposed to too much warmth. A very thick mixture is 5 tsp powdered print paste/cup of urea water. Urea water is made with 5 1/2 tbsps urea/cup of water.

I tend to use about equal parts urea water and the thick print paste mixture when monoprinting. I also use dyes that are about 10% concentrations (10 mg per 100 ml of urea water or 2 tbsps (roughly) dye powder per 1 cup of urea water. I mix up equal parts of my dye mixture with the print past in small portions (about 1/4 cup of each color I am going to use).

Then the fun begins!! Just slather some color onto whatever of the surfaces you have chosen. Cover up that surface with whichever color you want to use. If you have used thick dye colors, it will just sit there where you put it. If you have used very thin colors, they will bead up a little or a lot -- not always that predictable. If you used the thickened colors, you can then use any implement of your choice to make patterns in the dyes. Just scrape away the color or add brushstrokes or swirls. Best to avoid using complementary colors with too much mixing as you can get mud! After you have a surface that you like, just press your fabric down onto it and voila, a print. Let it sit for about four hours covered with plastic and then wash out. Sometimes you can get more than one print but the second will be a lot lighter.

This was made by applying the very lightly thickened dyes onto a piece of tablecloth plastic. The surface beads up a lot especially when using plastic that hasn't been used before. I then pressed the fabric onto the surface. When it dried, I applied thin dyes over the surface. I love that pitted surface you get.

I always try to have a surface that is at least as big as the cloth I am printing onto so either work with smaller pieces of fabric or find a surface that is much larger. The foam sheets come in either come in sizes form letter size to table top size.


Another approach is to take a small piece of foam or plexiglass or plastic sheet and directly paint onto it and then apply it like a stamp onto a piece of fabric. This is an example of one of the 200 images (each about 4 x 6 inches) that I created using this technique. I glopped pretty thickened dyes onto a piece of plexiglas and then took the broken end of a foam brush and scratch lines in. The circles were the top to the plastic containers. I love using the foam for this as well.





This was another direct dye application where I rolled a paint roller into thickened dyes and then painted directly onto the fabric with the roller. I would put a number of colors onto the roller and then just apply it.



This piece was made using a piece of plexiglas and applying thickened dyes onto it and then using it as a stamp onto the fabric. I also used thickened dyes in an applicator bottle for the lines. I then overpainted (after it dried) with thinned dyes and then washed everything out. As the days wear on, the thickened black dyes definitely weaken.

Monoprinting with MX Fiber Reactive Dyes - Part 1

This is an example of direct painting with Procion MX fiber reactive dyes. Some might call this a monoprint as it is one of a kind and uses some printing techniques. This was done by scrunching the fabric and pulling a roller brush through thickened paints and then applying to the scrunched fabric; then, when it was dried, applying thinned dyes in the empty spaces.

Zann is home for a week which is a refreshing change of pace around here so let's just hope the weather cooperates! With some luck, I might be able to engage her in some dyeing which I need to get back to. The biggest problem has been weather which has not been totally cooperative as we haven't had many warm days the past couple of weeks. Procion dyes really don't batch well below 70 degrees. As monoprinting and some of my salt dyeing are really "direct" dyeing applications, the batching time at 90 degrees is probably a minimum of four hours. Probably a lot longer at 70 degrees.

Direct dyeing is the applying of dye directly to either untreated or pre-treated fabrics. The "prepared for dyeing (pfd)" fabrics are pretreated by soaking them in a soda ash solution and then either drying them completely, leaving them damp or leaving them wet. You then apply either unthickened or thickened (with print paste) dyes directly to the fabric.

If you choose not to pre-treat the fabrics, then you still have a couple of options: (1) using a fixing agent after the fact to fix the dyes (this works best on smaller pieces but is very effective). You would do this by painting the fixing agent directly onto your dyed surface after it has dried. You let it sit for about an hour (don't let it dry) and then wash it all out. The fixing agent that I bought was from Dharma and was called Afterfix but I am sure ProChem makes the same thing. (2) Including a 4:1 mixture of baking soda/soda ash into your dyes themselves. You would only do this for small amounts of dye at a time as this mixture will cause the dyes to exhaust in a fairly short period of time. I make large quantities of the dyes but only make 1/4 cup quantities of the dyes with this baking soda (sodium bicarbonate)/soda ash (sodium carbonate).

The second approach is the one I use most frequently as it is considerably less labor intensive than painting the goopy Afterfix all over a large piece of fabric. However, many of us have forgotten and used non-soda ashed fabric and done some intricate painting and didn't want to lose it. Using the Afterfix is the ideal alternative here. Doug Wilson on Dyerslist also has a method where he "afterfixes" with a hot soda ash/very high salt bath. I have never tried this method but sounds theoretically like it would work. A friend of mine has also painted soda ash solution on after she painted the fabric and found that to work as well (my guess is you would have to have some pretty intense colors so that they wouldn't become very pale with the extra liquid).

If you have presoaked your fabric, you are ready to try some direct painting or monoprinting. Monoprinting (one print) as I will use it here, is a technique of creating an image on some other surface and then transferring it to your fabric. Most times you can only get one copy of the image although sometimes you can get a paler second or third copy using the techniques here. I took a wonderful week long monoprinting class with Ann Johnson (http://www.annjohnson.net/). We tried a number of approaches to see what techniques we preferred. The techniques included using thickened and non thickened dyes, using smooth acrylic surfaces or a rougher foam surface. The possibilities are endless. (To be Continued)

In the class I attended, we had three days to just explore our own images using any of the techniques we had used. As I am fairly familiar with how MX colors worked, I decided just to concentrate on making images with black and white. I made about two hundred different images just using the surfaces, the end of paint brushes and a broken foam brush and a bottle cap from the dye containers.
On this one I glopped some thickened dyes onto a good sized piece of acrylic (Plexiglas) and then smooshed (very scientific) the fabric down. I later overpainted with thinned dyes and probably did some other things in between!

With no camera in hand, I went to visit the opening of a friend's exhibit last night! So unfortunately there are no pictures from my blog, but are probably some from Marcia ( http://www.decampstudio.blogspot.com/) or from the artist herself - Jeanne Beck (http://www.exploringthesurface.com/). It was a very nice exhibit of Jeanne's work and it was good to see a lot of the RAFA members out there supporting her! You need to see her work in person to appreciate all the layers and detail in them.

Factor Five Leyden - Do I Have it or Not?

Well, bet you have never heard of this one so I won't keep you in suspense. It is the name of a genetic mutation that occurs on one very specific gene and is present in about 5% of the general population although it is predominant in those of us with very English heritages. A week ago my sister wrote that she had two blood clots which precipitated another bout of her colitis (she had severe life threatening ulcerative colitis as a teenager). One of the clots was near her colon, the other her liver. After blood tests, they found that she was positive for this genetic mutation and that it was the cause of these blood clots. So she notified me so that I could get tested as well.

I head to the doctor's today to find if I have the mutated gene as well. It is inherited either from the mother or father (or both). If inherited from only one parent (heterozygous), then you will have an increased tendency to have blood clots although many people go through life with this gene and never know they have it. It makes birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy a very bad idea though. It can also cause some signficant problems with having children including stillbirths and miscarriages. If you get the gene from both parents (homozygous), you can have some very significant troubles and have about 500 fold risk of getting clots. If I do have the gene, then my girls will have to be tested as well. If not, well then the girls don't have to worry!

Just got back from the laboratory where I got my test so now just have to wait for the results. The doctor said that he had several patients with this and definitely I should have the lab tests. He said about half the patients were on Coumadin and the other half weren't. As I have had no clots (seems this gene causes clots in the veins rather than arteries where most strokes occur), I probably won't have to have a preventive therapy. I will have to be careful about sitting for long periods of time (like on an airplane or in a car). I guess there is some greater risk at high altitudes as well. He said it is just important to keep the blood moving! Fortunately my Internist also has a specialty in hematology so it was "one stop shopping".